Will Capitalism Survive/Fix This?
- Thread starter tommo
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This is correct as far as I know. Inner city public school funding is comparable to some private school funding in some locations and higher than funding of some parochial school funding.. Perhaps inner city public school funding is even higher then the mean of all private school funding. We should consider, however, that that mean for private schools is watered down by low funding of a lot of very mediocre private schools in the Deep South that sprang up after integration.
If you were a teacher and offered a job at Choate versus a Detroit inner city school, how much premium in salary would you require to except the Detroit job over the Choate job? So it clearly isn't just a simple metric like funding that makes the difference; it is what you do with the funding, and a host of other factors. It is a multivariate problem that can't be addressed effectively by just throwing money at it. A kid who does poorly either academically or socially, as a rule, won't be in a good private school very long, and odds are poor that they would even be there in the first place, if we are considering the better and most selective private schools.
There is a lack of sufficient alternatives in many public school systems, and a total lack, naturally, in the private schools. The need for educational alternatives is unique to the public school systems, and dealing with students that fall outside the mainstream is a cost that private schools don't have to consider. We can expect a good public school system to provide not only for mainstream students, but also for the educationally challenged --what my generation called retarded students; for those students with a greater interest in vocational education, and for students with behavioral problems requiring close supervision and special programs. Providing these alternatives to public school students is expensive if done well. This is something the private schools don't deal with.
Oversimplifying a complex problem will lead easily to ineffective solutions. We can deal well with all of these problems inherent in public education, but not if we try to do it in the political arena.
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I thought you had implied that, my fault. We are on the same wavelength now.
The politicians with their inflated egos usually forget to ask the teachers and pupils what they would like and so get the usual boring stuff again. That's what happens here. They are stuck in the early 20th century and waaaaaaaay behind the times. It's gotta be fun and interesting and relevant I would say.
I appreciate your detailed comment but I think you deflect from some key simple realities. First, is the fact that inner-city schools are generally well funded by any measure.
Inner-City Schools spend more per student than state average spending and generally more than the top performing suburban schools. Inner-City spending is comparable to the best private school tuitions, much higher than average privates, and much, much higher than religious privates.
For examples, Camden, NJ (one of worst school systems in the U.S.) spent about $27,000 per student in 2015, NJ public average was about $18,500 (generally among best public schools in U.S.); Milburn/Short Hills, NJ spent $19,000...one of the top school districts in the U.S. Tuition at Delbarton School or Pingry, private schools ranked in top of all U.S. Schools, is about $25,000 to $32,000 depending on grade.
So, generally speaking, the worst school in the U.S. costs in the ball park as the best school in the U.S.
Second, Public Schools are political by nature; as you suggest that is a large part of why the issues are so intractable.
Third, the teacher salaries are the key expense issue; your Choate/Detroit analogy is deceptive because it assumes that it is.
The key expense issues are administrative budgets and administrative salaries, the ratio of administrators to teachers, along with cost of maintenance of facilities, maintenance staffing and salaries, and significantly, with employees, the excessive cost of medical insurance and defined benefit pensions that are gamed.
The real tragedy in public school funding today is that all increased revenue from hear on out will likely be applied to pension and medical costs for teachers who are retired and have moved away from the school districts that must continue to pay them. Actual funding for education is decreasing as more revenue is allocated to the unfunded entitlement problem.
Finally, with regard to the argument that public schools must be maintained because of special needs and low performing students; that argument fails on multiple levels.
First, this is no excuse to under serve the needs of the majority of students, just to serve the special needs of a minority. You can do both, and they don't need to be done together in all cases and they don't need to funded by the same budget or from the same revenue sources. You conflate a social obligation and duty with a general education objective. The issue narrative was positioned that way politically and it has hurt the education system as a whole.
Second, it is not true that private schools positively select leaving the public school with the job of educating the worst students. The prevalent private school presence in the inner-city is the parochial school system which accepts all students and is generally not merit based. Studies show that students of the same underprivileged back ground do better in the private environment than the public school system, not because they are positively selected. There is something wrong with the public schools that is not caused by the students.
I will build two identical schools 1 block apart. I will staff them with exactly the same number of qualified administrators and support staff and the same student teacher ratio. I will select highly qualified teachers and draw their names from a hat to decide which teacher will teach at which of the two schools. I will pay everyone in equivalent positions at the two schools identically. From a pool of students far larger than what is needed to populate both schools with identical numbers of students, I will assign an identical number of students in each grade to each school. To one school I will assign 80% of the students selected from those that usually do their homework on time, seldom miss classes, are achieving in the upper 50th percentile on standardized exams, and are reading at or above grade level. To that same school I will assign 20% of students selected because they are in the lower 50th percentile on standardized exams, often miss classes, seldom do their homework on time and are reading below grade level. To the other school I will make the same assignments but reverse the percentages so that 80% of the students are performing poorly and 20% are performing as expected or better.
Which school is the better school? Which school has better teachers? Which school will have the better performance record over all. Which school will have the highest maintenance and other costs overall.
What is the cause of the difference between these two schools? What would you do about it, if anything?
Which school is the better school? Which school has better teachers? Which school will have the better performance record over all. Which school will have the highest maintenance and other costs overall.
What is the cause of the difference between these two schools? What would you do about it, if anything?
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Just to make it clear. I have not done that. I have pointed out, without saying it directly, nor advocating, that our present, public school systems attempt to "mainstream" retarded and special needs children. This practice naturally adds disproportionately to per student costs; a cost largely absent from private schools. We should try to make apt comparisons, and avoid invalid ones.
I appreciate your comment and thoughtfulness but I don't want to argue and explore basic propositions that are well established; I certainly don't want to participate in de novo thought experiments when the issues have extensive research already.
The research on these issues are well presented by Jay P. Greene, "Education Myths" (manhattan-institute.org/educationmyths).
Also, check out the Center for Educational Innovation (www.the-cei.org) at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (www.manhattan-institute.org).
See also, Adam B. Schaeffer, "They Spend What? The Real Cost of Public Schools" (www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/they_spend_what_real_cost_public_schools; showing that real cost is higher than published costs), and from the other side of the political spectrum, in Slate.com, Reihan Salam, "$26,000 per Student? School Reformers Should Try to Make Public Schools Cheaper, Not Just Better" (www.slate.com/article/news/politics/politics 2014/05/public_schools_and_reform_u_s_schools_cost_way_too_much_and_should_be_cheaper.html.
You may be preaching to the choir. The Cato article was well done when it came to tracking down the real costs of public education in the districts they studied. To bad they didn't apply the same thoroughness to their "estimated" private school costs. They compared "real" public school costs to "estimated" private school costs -- their method of arriving at the latter, a joke really! Apparently they didn't have access to "real" private school budgets. And of course they made no attempt at all to compare what was included in the real public school costs to what was included in the estimated private school costs. Had they, they would have discovered they were comparing not even apple to oranges but Big Macs to chocolate covered ants. So, another could-have-been good study bites the dust. It is still useful though. It can be used to light our Christmas yule log.
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So what about the other references?
Conceding with out agreeing to what you suggest above, I wonder, nonetheless, if the public schools are shouldering more than the cost of focused general education, as you say, if they are deflected in many directions, and the private schools are simply focused on their core constituency (Parents), and the placement of their students in the 'next step,' however that may be defined... and then, because of that deflected and overwhelmed objective, the public schools do not produce comparable education results for their average student, or any of their students, then isn't that an admission, a condemnation of the public school organization, its lack of focus, its dysfunctional organization, its detachment from its express constituency, and isn't that grounds to condemn its failure to serve the social purpose for which it was established and for which it still purports to pursue?
Is anyone left better off outside the school employment role?